Carbon reduction, environmental protection drive city's efforts to realize its green transformation

This year, the Qingdao government has upheld the development concept centered on people and made continuous efforts in the environment, education, healthcare, sports and culture, enhancing service quality and efficiency.

To help build an ecological civilization, Qingdao, a coastal city in East China's Shandong province, is ramping up its efforts to realize green development by transforming its industry and energy structure, reducing its carbon emissions, and strengthening its environmental protection.

With more than 2,300 green enterprises, the city ranks at the provincial forefront in terms of quantity and revenue scale. It has also established 54 large green factories and 11 green supply chain management enterprises.

Qingdao is in the process of upgrading its energy structure, and bolstering clean and efficient utilization of coal. This year, the city's total installed capacity of new energy power generation exceeded coal-fired power for the first time, reaching 5.38 million kilowatts.

A comprehensive low-carbon transportation system is also under construction. About 97 percent of Qingdao's operational buses now use new energy and clean energy, and its sea-rail intermodal volume ranks first among coastal ports nationwide for the ninth consecutive year.

Since the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), the city's coal consumption has dropped below 30 percent. Qingdao has already achieved the target for the 14th Five-Year Plan on reducing chemical oxygen demand, ammonia nitrogen and volatile organic compounds, while boosting resource-saving production that prioritizes environmental protection.

In the industrial sector, Qingdao serves as a key city for construction of a national waste material recycling system, and in agriculture, it is steadily improving green production levels, with a straw utilization rate of 96 percent and a stable livestock manure utilization rate of over 90 percent.

Meanwhile, the city is integrating urban-rural sanitation, building 904 routes for the collection and classification of household waste and achieving a 100 percent harmless treatment rate, while in the construction sector, the rate of resource utilization of construction waste has exceeded 71 percent. The city houses 143 million square meters of green buildings.

Ecological protection

Qingdao has delineated 1,705 square kilometers of ecological protection redlines and has set up 140 environmental automatic air monitoring stations covering towns, streets and functional areas, as well as 66 surface water monitoring sections on key river basins, important water resources and large industrial parks.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with improving the entire governance system and completing rectification of 772 river outfalls and 6,174 marine outfalls, the city is eliminating or controlling pollution sources such as coal burning, industry, motor vehicles and ships by completing 450,000 rural clean heating transformations and adding 20.75 million sq m of urban centralized heating areas.

Qingdao's efforts to control spring dust and combat ozone pollution in the summer and autumn include intensified dust control measures at construction sites, rectifying 1,120 bare land plots and completing over 6,000 governance projects. The city is also carrying out land greening, completing afforestation on 1,794 hectares of barren mountains and burnt areas, and improving the quality and efficiency of 10,672 hectares of forests.

Over the past three years, 341 hectares of historical abandoned mines have been rectified. Three Qingdao mines are now included in the national green mine list, and the Jiuding Manor project in Laixi city was named one of China's top 10 typical cases of social capital participation in ecological restoration.

The city is also enhancing biodiversity protection, achieving a global record for the most sightings of the Chinese crested tern, aka "the mythical bird".

While advancing construction of a park city, Qingdao continues to increase greenery, constructing 289 kilometers of urban greenways, 191 pocket parks and a total of 286 provincial-level and 700 city-level beautiful rural demonstration villages.